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Seeing Eye, by Michael Martone

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Seeing Eye, by Michael Martone

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Description

A collection of short stories, most of them set in Indiana, focuses on the meddling of fact and fiction and includes a dozen satiric—but also sympathetic—tales written in the persona of Indiana’s famous son, Dan Quayle.

Praise

From Publishers Weekly

This savvy collection of short fiction is divided into three very different parts. The first, "The War that Never Ends," is composed of 17 brief vignettes and character sketches. While some, such as "Limited" (in which a train passenger observes a thrown rock shatter a railcar window), attain an elliptical, gnomic power, most are so skeletal they become weightless. The second section, "Pensees: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle," is made up of slightly longer pieces narrated by the former Veep. Amazingly, they often give a twisted dignity and poignance to vapidness, as when Quayle, seated prominently beside the Speaker of the House during a State of the Union address, tries to banish his discomfort by imagining the members of Congress naked: "Trickles of sweat deliberately trace the topography of Teddy's sagging breasts.... Bill's thighs have been stripped of veins for his bypass. The gentleman from New Jersey has new plugs.... I see into them. My job description gives me this vision since all I do is wait on death." The last section of the book, "Seeing Eye," is composed of six conventional-length stories that revel in the slightly peculiar. The title story takes place in a town whose main industry is training seeing-eye dogs: "... the town is overly complicated for its size, presenting to the dogs every possible distraction.... Dummy fire hydrants. Revolving doors in the butcher shop.... An escalator leading down to a subway station with turnstiles but no trains." Although this is an uneven collection, Martone (Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List) proves himself a writer of delicate sensibility whose work is notable for its delightfully quirky details and careful prose. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

ABOUT MICHAEL MARTONE

Michael Martone is a professor at the creative writing program at the University of Alabama, and is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction.